Blocking Spam and Spyware For Dummies

by Peter H. Gregory, Mike Simon
??(2 customer reviews)
Paperback: Friday, April 22, 2005 (For Dummies)

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Editorial Reviews

Book Description
Fight back and save money with these expert tips

Find out what spam and spyware cost your company, and how to stop them

Whether yours is a one-person business or a multi-million dollar corporation, here's help giving spammers and spies the bum's rush. Two veterans of the spam wars help you analyze your situation, choose the right solutions, set up and maintain them, and even show the bean-counters why such defenses are essential.

Discover how to

Understand how spammers get addresses
Calculate the cost of spam and spyware
Re-engineer your business processes
Select spam and spyware filters
Manage implementation and maintenance

Download Description

Despite recent legislation in the U.S. and other countries, the volume of spam continues to growits increasing at a rate of 37 percent a week, according to one recent reportand now accounts for 60 to 75 percent of all e-mail
Shows small business people and corporate IS professionals how to fight back successfully against this onslaught, offering savvy advice on selecting and deploying a spam filter as well as training and supporting users
Provides insider tips on troubleshooting and fine-tuning a spam filter, as well as exclusive guidance on how to deal with "Joe Jobs" spam attacks, in which spammers hijack a corporate domain name

Reader Reviews

Good Overview and Some Things You Can Do, Wednesday, December 07, 2005

There are some thing that you can do to fight SPAM and Spyware. But in spite of all that people are doing the problem continuous to grow. This book describes the current state of SPAM, spyware, and phising systems as of its publication date (April 22, 2005).

Unfortunately there is only so much that you can do without restricting yourself so much that e-mail becomes almost impossible for you to use. In the final analysis the authors talk about filters you can install, they talk about blocking software. But in the end, it comes down to users acting intelligently and not ordering the replica watches, the viagra (half of which is not viagra but just sugar pills), the things that increase the size of various body parts. And so far there seems to be enough people ordering that the spammers keep going.

I wonder why the officials in charge of this, whoever they may be, can't just follow the money. Where does the credit card get processed, where is the product shipped? If you stop people from benefiting, the spam will stop. There's probably a good reason.

talks well about phishing, Monday, June 20, 2005

The difference between this book and other books on spam published as recently as a year ago is the extensive discussion given here on phishing. The latter has grown enormously in 18 months. Earlier antispam books gave it little or no mention.

But Gregory points out that while "regular" spam might or might not be fraudulent, phishing always is. He thus places it not as a subset of spam, but as a different category of malware. So while the book has a decent explanation of spam, this is indistinguishable from that given in other texts. Rather, the distinguishing feature of this book is the phishing explanation.

As for what he offers for remedies, he basically says that end user education is the only answer. The book does not describe any effective, known technological solution. So the fallback policy is the user education.

In contrast, our company [Metaswarm] has 16 US Patents Pending on antiphishing. Qualitatively different from anything described in the book. Which is no detraction from the book, as it provides a good summary of the public state of the art.

We believe our Pendings will squash phishing.